


parasite

by meritmut



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Comics)
Genre: Aftermath of Possession, Angst, Body Dysphoria, Established Relationship, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Psychological Trauma, Sifki Week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-19 04:43:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19968235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: The others won’t come near her chambers anymore. She frightens them, she thinks.





	parasite

**Author's Note:**

> for the prompt 'powerless'
> 
> remember that time loki stole sif's skin

She wakes to the sound of her own screaming.

There is a knife in her hand: it takes Sif a scattered few seconds to recognise it as the one that lives ordinarily under her pillow. The pale steel shines like water where the starlight catches it, her reflection blurred into something misshapen and unfamiliar in the surface of the blade.

She is clutching the hilt so tightly there will be dents in her palm when she loosens her grip; strange welts in the mirror image of its serpentine shape, reddened half-moons in the flesh around it where her blunt nails dig into her skin.

It isn’t hers. The knife—the hand—none of this is hers.

“You aren’t mine,” she tells the blade.

In the songs sung by the skalds the enchanted steel would come alive and answer her.

In the songs, the world goes back to normal when the spell is broken.

Sif swallows, wincing as her parched throat protests the reflex. Her mouth is a desert filled with acrid sourness from the wine that sits heavy and nauseating in her belly; her tongue is thick and fuzzy, a dead animal pinned between her teeth. Her head pounds like all of Niðavellir’s hammers are at work inside her skull but it hurts less than yesterday, and tomorrow it will hurt less still.

In the beginning she only needed the wine to ease her mind.

She does not sleep without it now.

“You aren’t mine,” she says again, just to hear the sound of her own voice in the dark.

But in the dark it could be anyone’s.

⚶

Loki’s hands are warm on her face, callused palms and seeking fingers more practised in gentleness than hers could ever be.

Her hands are cold, now, but he never complains.

Cold as yours, she teases sometimes, if the dead thing that takes the place of her voice these days could be considered capable of _teasing,_ but Loki only shakes his head with a smile that does not quite reach his eyes and bends to press kisses to her fingertips and her knuckles, and tells her she is mistaken.

“You are warm as Múspell, my lady,” he murmurs, lifting her hands up to cradle his cheeks as if to prove the point. If he notices the way they tremble, he says nothing of it.

⚶

With a cry Sif hurls the knife away from her, wincing to hear it clatter against stone somewhere in the shadows of her chamber. The room is darker than she is accustomed to: she’d forgotten to stoke the fire before she passed out, sinking into a longed-for oblivion amid the furs that went beyond _ripe_ some time ago.

The flames have long since withered down to ash within the hearth, the only light in her quarters the dim silver haze of a clear night.

Thyra would have built the fire, had Sif not dismissed her. She has not seen the maiden in days.

The others won’t come near her chambers anymore. She frightens them, she thinks.

She frightens herself.

Groaning, Sif presses the heels of her hands against her eyes until stars dance in her vision and the ache behind her forehead matches the one between her temples. The noise rumbles up from deep inside her and even though she can feel it in her own chest it feels—it _sounds—_ like it comes from another place. The hands that touch her feel like they belong to another body.

It isn’t that her voice is different: it isn’t that her hands or her face have changed.

It’s that there is something else inside her.

It is that she was stolen, and she cannot be sure she got all of herself back.

 _Stolen_. Revulsion churns like bile in her gut.

She was _possessed._

⚶

When she picked up a practice glaive and went for the mannequin her hands didn’t know what to do with themselves. She felt clumsy, unbalanced, as if her mind and her body had been pulled asunder and stitched back together only—only something went wrong.

When she roared and tossed the lance aside the other warriors watched with alarm and consternation in their eyes as she stormed from the yard.

She does not go there anymore.

⚶

She does sleep, in brief and uneasy snatches of wine-soaked time. Her dreams are vivid and terrible with memories for which she was not present, echoing with words spilled from her lips in shapes her mind has no memory of forging.

The voice that is not her voice mocks her with things she has no memory of saying.

_Liberated, now, I am at peace._

She does not remember peace.

_We have all been blessed with a second chance._

Asgard is whole again and Sif—Sif is numb.

⚶

“Can’t you feel it?” she asks, when Loki’s lips find the pulse point in her throat.

When she puts her own fingers there she feels nothing.

“Feel what?” he murmurs, nipping at her skin in the way that once made her shiver and sigh.

“I don’t know,” Sif answers.

⚶

Sometimes in her dreams she is cut open, and watches from outside herself as something else climbs inside and wears her skin. It moves her arms and her legs, it speaks with her mouth.

It stares back at her with crimson eyes.

⚶

She isn’t aware of when it starts—the strange little motions, the things her hands do when she isn’t paying attention. Maybe she could pass it off as spending too much time around him, absorbing his tics and habits and the way that even in idleness his hands are never still, but she has known and loved those hands for centuries: why would it only start now?

How could she learn the shapes of the elder runes, and each of their meanings, without ever knowing it?

Loki catches her unconsciously etching sigils into the tabletop with her finger one day and the way he stares at her fills her stomach with cold dread.

His eyes lift slowly from her hands to her face and—she has never seen him look afraid before.

⚶

_If you will not grant that, then kill me now._

“Then kill me now,” she echoes to the stillness of the morning.

“Sif?”

Bleary-eyed, Loki gazes up at her from his side of the bed. She doesn’t know when it became his side, or when it stopped being her bed and became _theirs._ She doesn’t know why she sometimes feels the urge to set fire to it with both of them in it.

She doesn’t know why she knows what he thinks when he looks at her now, when before she had always been left to wonder.

He loves her, she knows, inasmuch as he is capable of loving anything and not destroying it.

Which is to say: not at all, but she knew that when she found she loved him too.

“It’s alright,” she tells him, moving her hand down to her side so he cannot see where she has been picking at her skin. She keeps thinking she will find something other than red underneath it. “Go back to sleep.”

Or worse: that she will find nothing there at all.

⚶

Staggering to her feet, Sif pushes through the thudding headache and follows the sound the knife had made into the opposite corner of the room.

The hilt is still warm when she picks it up again, or maybe it is only that her hands have grown so cold.

“You are not mine,” she says for the third time.

She squeezes her free hand into a fist again, just to check—just to be sure.

She feels nothing.

The hand is no longer hers.

When she looks down at her forearm she can see the winter-blue bleeding through her skin.

 _You are not me,_ she thinks.

Slowly, hesitantly, she brings the knife up and rests it against the crook of her arm, just above where the numbness begins. It will spread, soon: eventually it will claim all of her.

Unless she stops it.

Sif tightens her grip.

Unless she gets it out.


End file.
